


Come Back

by LucyLovecraft



Category: Ogniem i Mieczem | With Fire and Sword (1999), Trylogia | The Trilogy - Henryk Sienkiewicz
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dark, Horror, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-21
Updated: 2019-10-21
Packaged: 2020-12-27 06:15:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21114050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LucyLovecraft/pseuds/LucyLovecraft
Summary: Bohun returns to Devil's Gorge to find a scene of destruction that he cannot understand. He had always feared that Helena might be stolen from him, but not like this.Not like this.





	Come Back

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ankalime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ankalime/gifts).

> The incredibly talented [ankalime](https://ankalime.tumblr.com/) drew this for me. [You can find their commission info here!](https://ankalime.tumblr.com/post/185161824050/ankalime-my-commissions-are-open-rules-i)

— ☽ — ☾ —

Too late. It was all too late. His world had ended before it had ever begun. 

Bohun had ridden back to Devil’s Gorge with his whip lashing red stripes into his horse’s flanks to make it run apace with his wildly beating heart. He was so full of joy to return to her that he could have sung. He was so full of fear to see the hatred in her eyes again that he could have screamed.

When he saw Horpyna’s body he did scream. 

He did not even know what it meant then. Her body lay on the open ground before her house. The witch’s dark hair tangled around her shoulders, framing a face already falling to decay. As he reined up hard, jagging the bit against his horse’s foaming mouth, he saw something which stirred a dread he could not yet name: there was no mark or wound on her body. 

But Horpyna did not matter. 

Bohun threw himself from the saddle, running to the door with such desperate speed that he fell sprawling when it swung drunkenly on its broken hinges.

“Princess!” 

He did not expect an answer, not from such a scene as he now saw before him. 

At first he only stood reeling amidst the desolation, trying to make sense of chaos. All the wealth of Bar, every treasure he had brought to gild her cage—all had been destroyed as though the hand of God had struck against this carefully-hoarded treasure trove of all his hopes. The bed had been obliterated into shattered timbers and tumbled drifts of down. Gold and silver ornaments showed in twisted heaps in corners, while others had been cast with such force that they stuck from the walls as if driven there with a hammer. Heavy silken tapestries lay in ragged shreds, their jewel-bright threads straggling in a tangled chaos across rough-hewn floorboards. Overcast light fell coldy in through a window in which no shard of glass remained and through which one of the priceless brocades had been half-thrown.

And of his greatest treasure of all, there was not even a sign.

If chaos had struck once, it now struck again as he tore through the room, then the house, then the outbuildings. In every place, he seemed to have followed in the footsteps of that greater destructive force. Yet nothing equalled the ruination which had smote Helena’s room with all the force of God’s judgement.

Bohun understood nothing of what he saw, he knew only that _she _was not there.

His hands and arms were bleeding from cuts he did not feel. Shivering with sweat, he staggered back to her room, begging with God and the Devil to let her somehow be there when he returned.

Of course she was not there.

A second destruction fell on the room as Bohun threw himself into despairing rage, trying to break what had broken him. But when anguish and exhaustion finally robbed him of his last strength, he collapsed onto the wreckage of the bed and screamed her name until his voice was gone and his damaged throat could only produce broken moans like a damned soul’s.

But where had they taken her? They had killed Horpyna, and her hunchback’s body had been found broken where he’d tried to cower in the barn, but Helena was not here. She might even be alive.

Bohun dragged himself to his feet, hope and rage breathing fire into his veins again. He stumbled to the window, wondering if he might see some sign of where his unknown enemies had taken her.

The wind hissed around the corners of the empty frame. As Bohun looked out, he could see clearly back the way he’d come: out towards the secret way through the waterfall and into the haunted gorge beyond.

Yet as he stood there a strange significance in that window forced itself upon his chaos-numbed mind. As he looked, it came to him that while violence had fallen in a meaningless whirlwind upon every item in that room, the window had been the focus of a more particular destruction. No jagged shard of glass remained. The brocade that lay half-thrown through the empty frame suddenly gained a sense of purpose that stole his breath. The fire of a truer hope sparked in his breast. What he saw next brought so piercing a joy that he gasped as though in pain. He stretched out his hand and caught salvation between his fingers.

There, caught from the jagged edge of the window frame, were a few strands of long, night-black hair.

Destruction had come to the Devil’s Gorge, but Helena had escaped.

— ☽ — ☾ —

Though the sky above was still shaded blue with evening, shadow lay deep in Devil’s Gorge as Bohun ran back along Helena’s track. He dragged his stumbling horse behind him, terrified to mount lest he should fail to see some sign that Helena had fled down one of the branching gullies or sought shelter in some secret place.

He blundered on through the undergrowth, heedless of briars and bracken. At each forward step he saw signs of Helena’s passing: a shred of clothing on a thorn, a footstep in black earth, or a trailing strand of hair on a branch. 

It must have been dark when she fled. Too many times she had fallen or veered wildly away from obstacles that Bohun clearly saw for himself in the evening light. More than once he found rusty smears on a branch or boulder where her seeking hands had kept her from collision, but at a bloody price.

_Brave,_ his loving heart wept. _Always brave. Oh, my little bird, how brave you were to fly._

As evening deepened, his horse began to whicker and roll its eyes, but Bohun pressed on. He remembered that each nighttime ride through the gorge with Horpyna to guide him. Shadows had seemed to stretch and shiver when he did not look directly at them. What had he to fear then? When last he had ridden through this place in darkness Bohun had all he wished in the world with him—and Horpyna there to guard them. He had feared no nightmares then.

As daylight waned a chill mist seeped up out of the accursed earth. Another kind of fear crept into his heart.

_No night horror would have dared touch her! No monster could touch her! God would not allow it!_

But panic began to seize him, chittering and whispering to him until he stumbled as he ran on to escape it.

When the gorge widened to reveal the old graves, Bohun’s every gasped breath had become a prayer for the woman he loved.

He had galloper through earlier daytime, blind with joy and heedless of anything but the road ahead of him. Now he went forward with horror breathing cold upon his neck. 

Perhaps the starlight had finally shown her what lay before her feet. Perhaps some blessed hand had turned her steps from the path she had followed. But the footsteps Bohun followed now showed no such grace: they were sharply dug into the earth, with clods of earth cast far back behind. 

“No,” he groaned, unable to believe, but believing all too well. “No, no! No, God, please not this!”

The tracks fled, and fell, and yet still ran on into the shadows of the gorge. Bohun followed them in truth, tumbling over every obstacle and sobbing as he fought to outrace doom. He had lost the horse’s reins somewhere, he did not know when. It did not matter. Helena’s course took her straight through the undergrowth towards a sheer wall of the overhanging cliffs, and though with every step Bohun prayed to see her turn away towards the opening of the gorge, certainty had already begun to gnaw at his mind.

At first, he could not understand what he saw: her trail seemed to disappear. He cast wildly about amongst the mist-blurred bracken, crying her name, unable to see where she had gone.

Horror seized him by the throat. Had something truly taken her as a bird of prey snatches its prey from the loving earth?

“Princess!” he cried, clawing through ferns and briars. “Princess!”

But then Bohun saw it as he fought blindly through to the very foot of the cliff: a small hollow sunken deep into the looming stone, half-hidden by trailing ivy.

Stooping, he ducked inside, batting away the vines. Yet it was more of a tunnel than a cave, and he struck his head hard against the ceiling so hard that it brought him to his knees.

There, in the darkness, half-blinded by his own blood streaming into his eyes, Bohun saw her. Only the faintest light reached in through the cave mouth, casting her gown and body in the faintest whisper of white. She was pale. And she was still. 

“Princess?”

He crawled to her, tears already mingling with blood to blind his sight. His arms caught her up, and he knew—he knew before he’d touched her— he knew before her head lolled back against his arm—he knew before he saw the dark, silent pools of her staring eyes.

“No,” he moaned. “No, _please!”_

Her body was cold as the stone upon which she lay, but he held her to his chest as if his heart could bleed heat back into her corpse. But she did not move. He knew she never would again.

If there were monsters to hear him scream, then perhaps they heard his howl as that of one of their own.

Bohun had thought he’d known despair before, but it had been as nothing to the black, infinite sea into which he now fell. Inimical stone echoed his screams back to him until his own ears rang with the sound, and still he screamed. He held her in his arms and kissed her cold lips, begging her to wake up, then screamed to God to give her back to him.

If night had fallen, he did not know. Time had ended, and the last hope of his life had been snuffed out. Futurity was the black night under stone and her dead body in his arms. There would be nothing more. The sun could rise, but he would be here. Days might turn into weeks, and weeks to years, and years to centuries, and at the Day of Judgement he would be here still, with the woman he loved in his arms. She hadn’t loved him, and he had hated her for it. But he would not abandon her, nor attempt to live on in a world she had left.

Night fell in the world beyond the cave, and he wept as he saw the the last pale ghost of her fade from his vision as the last of daylight died. He still felt her weight, heavy and dead as clay in his arms. She was the only thing left of reality, apart from pain. And in the void of perfect darkness, Bohun sobbed until consciousness itself fled from him.

He awoke in the black, without star or moonlight, and without warmth enough in his body to tell himself from the hard bones of the earth upon which he lay. But _she was gone_.

Bohun scrambled up to hands and knees, feeling for her in the dark. How had he lost her?

He crawled across the floor of the small chamber, seeking with his hands, sobbing again—though he no longer knew where his tears came from, he had shed so many. He struck against one wall of the cave, then turned to blindly follow the curve of it with one hand as he sought with the other. His palm tore open against the jagged rocks, and still he crawled on seeking her.

At last his hand found it: the smooth, cold shape of her ankle, with the tattered hem of her skirt catching against his mangled hand.

“I’m sorry,” he told her, weeping, pulling himself towards her, holding tight to her dead ankle so as not to somehow lose her again in the darkness. “I fell asleep. I don’t know how—I don’t—but I won’t leave you again. I promise!”

When a cold hand seized his wrist, a delirium of hope so intense seized him that he thought his heart had stopped. Then his hand was raised, and he felt something cold and slick press against his bleeding palm. And in the darkness he heard one, and one sound only—not a voice, not a breath—but only the slurping, liquid sound of swallowing echoed back from the stone.

  
— ☽ — ☾ —

He woke again, staring up at the night sky. It showed only as a narrow sliver of starscape hemmed in on either side by the walls of the gorge. Yet it was more than enough to see by.

“Princess?”

She stood over him, silhouetted against the stars with the white of her chemise frosted with starlight. But she said nothing. 

Instead, she began to walk, or seemed to.

He could see she walked by the swaying movement of her two long braids and the rise and fall of her mud-caked feet, but there was no other sign to show that she passed over earth. She did not stumble. She did not reach out a hand to steady herself. Helena walked, leaving not a single imprint in earth, and Bohun wondered how many times her feet had walked this path and yet left no mark.

Silent tears rolled down Bohun’s cheeks as he followed her ghostly figure through the night. He did not want to follow her, but he had never had a choice. Every instinct had always driven him towards her: to throw himself at her feet, to seek glory so that she might love him, to kill her kin, to save her from the death she’d chosen over him, and to hide her away here in the haunted vale where the man she loved could never find her. If he had never cared for her wishes, he had yet been slave enough to his fantasies of her to have no other will of his own.

They came at last to the silent ruins of Horpyna’s home. Some night vermin fled from the witch’s body as they approached and Bohun flinched back with a cry. But Helena showed no sign that she had seen or noticed. She merely paused as she came level with the witch’s corpse, as if listening. But, apparently, satisfied, she walked on. She moved with slow purpose to the house, never faltering, and merely bending her head with silent grace as she entered the room where she had been a captive.

Transfixed, Bohun stood a moment alone as an imbecile hope—_Does she want me to follow? Does she remember that I was there with her?_—warred with the all hopeless realities he’d known. 

Reality won, as it always had. 

The silence of the night shattered in a cataclysm of violence: splintering wood, smash and clatter of broken metal, and the impossible sound of heavy fabrics ripped apart by inhuman strength. 

“Oh no,” Bohun begged, the night sky skewing dizzily above him. “No, please!”

But the noises did not stop, and even when he covered his ears and screamed, the sounds still beat upon his eardrums and hammered at his mind until he collapsed, writhing on the cold earth with his mouth open and dirt between his teeth as he screamed.

When the sounds stopped, he had no more strength left to sob his relief. But he found himself whimpering her name, even as he feared to speak it. 

And something spoke to him in answer. Something soft, sweet to his ears, and colder than the furthest stars: _“Jurko.”_

He blundered through the doorway to the bedroom. She stood like a pale statue amidst shadowed chaos. A few drifting feathers darkened the starlit square of the window, and against that silvery outline she was only a paler shade of darkness.

“Princess?” he whispered.

He was horribly aware that the only sound in the room was that of his own breathing.

“Helena, I’m sorry!”

The silent figure tilted its head, as if listening.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry! I’m sorry for it all—and for what I said! You were never a curse to me,” he sobbed. “Never. I love you! I would have chosen to love you over glory, over death, over anything in the whole wide world!”

She turned, and found himself laughing and sobbing with gratitude that at last—at long last—she had heard him! She must have understood! What did the rest of it matter if at last she had understood that he loved her?

Helena moved too quickly for him to have seen it, and he flinched back from the icy touch of her palm against his cheek.

_“But you were a curse to me, Jurko,” _said a whispering voice which Bohun shuddered to hear—one that could not have come from the throat of a living being. It was flat, inflectionless, and utterly devoid of the spark that had once been Helena’s life. 

“I—I loved you!” he protested. 

Her cold fingers had caught in his hair, dragging his head to one side with irresistible force. He clapped one hand against her arm, trying to push her back, but her arm was like dead stone beneath the linen softness of her sleeve.

“I never meant to harm you!” Bohun did not care that he was about to die. He would die with the only truths he possessed on his lips. “I loved you with all my heart! I wanted a life for us, Helena!”

The implacable power of her grasp slackened, and Bohun found himself sobbing and shivering against her icy hand.

“Please,” he begged, “don’t you know I loved you?”

_“I think I knew, once,” _said that death-rattle whisper. _“When I loved you, I think I knew that you loved me. But then you stopped loving me, even though you said you loved me still.”_

“I never stopped!” 

_“I feared you more than the night.”_

“No,” he sobbed, “no, Helena, I only wanted us to be together. I would have done anything for you! Anything!”

She did not move, but neither did she speak, and Bohun had a sudden, terrifying sense that this being that was no longer quite Helena was slowly considering his words with a mind that was no longer human.

_“Anything? That is not true. I wanted to leave. I wanted…” _

But the vampire stopped, lifting its head like a beast trying to catch a scent on the breeze. 

Bohun waited with his breath caught in his throat.

Slowly, the creature that had been Helena lowered its hand. Bohun gasped as he was released, but had neither will nor wish to flee. Instead he watched as she disappeared from the faint wash of ghostly starlight that had illuminated her. There was silence, and then the slow, methodical sounds as Helena worked through the wreckage of the room, her dead hands searching for something that was not there to be found. He could hear her: beginning in one corner then worked slowly, methodically through the room, inch by inch, turning over jeweled caskets and broken furniture with the same, unvarying rhythm.

He knew she could not leave this valley. He knew she would never be able to leave the last ground she had walked when she was alive. Bohun knew whom she sought, but he was not here. 

“Helena,” he whispered, hands covering his ears to block out the noise. “Helena, he’s not here! I’m sorry! I’m sorry, please!” 

Something broke within him then, and he began to stumble towards her in the dark, hands outstretched. 

“Stop! It’s my fault!” he screamed. “I know you didn’t love me, but I loved you so much! I just wanted you to be mine!”

A cold hand seized him by the throat and he whimpered as glass-hard nails dug into his skin. 

_“Was it you?”_

He tried to nod, but his head was held fast.

_“You were the one who did this?” _Her voice had been so utterly devoid of emotion before that to even the faintest hints of it now made the hair on Bohun’s head stand on end.

“No! N-n-not that! But I brought you here,”he confessed, tears rolling down his cheeks to patter on her icy skin “I did! I brought you here, when you didn’t want me to! Because I wanted you to be mine, and no one else’s!”

_“You are the reason I am here?”_

“Yes! Because I loved you, Helena.”

_“And that is why I am cold? It was you who found me in the night?” _A dead thing should not sound scared.

“N-n-no! No, that wasn’t—” Bohun swallowed back sobs. “Are you cold?”

_“I am so cold. I wake, and I am cold, and I come here, and I search, and I am cold. Why is it so cold?”_

He felt the icy exhalation against his skin as she spoke, her breath rank with the smell of dead blood. She had to draw in air to have a voice, but she did not breathe.

“Helena? Do you… Can you remember my name? Can you say it again?”

Her hand tightened its grip.

_“Jurko,” _she said, something deep within her throat rolling the “r” through soft tissue in ways no living body ever could.

He closed his eyes. Slowly, he reached out his arms and slipped them around her waist.

“You don’t have to be cold, princess. I’ll never leave you.”

_“But I am. I can’t find… I can’t find… What am I searching for? And I am so cold.”_

“It’s my fault,” he wept. “But ey, I have warmth to spare, don’t I, little bird? No warmth left for me in life if you’re cold.”

Bohun wished he could see her more clearly in the dark. He wished he could have stolen one last glimpse at her face, no matter what he might have seen there. But the night was dark and the bloody inertias of his life guided his hand: he was already tugging at his shirt, pulling down the collar.

“Here, Helena,” he sobbed. “Don’t be cold. Don’t be afraid, I—”

Bohun had meant to say more, but the crushing force of her grasp and the icy needles of her teeth sinking into his flesh robbed him of everything but his screams, and even those lasted for only a few beats of his dying heart.

He died without being able to say his last words, without being able to make what little atonement he could. What he should have said first he had held back until last—and in the end it was too late. She would be condemned to walk over this valley, seeking and never finding what she sought. Nothing he could have done could change that. But Bohun fought to speak, even though he no longer had the strength to draw air into his lungs, struggling weakly in her arms as a final darkness closed over him. 

He had meant to give her the only gift she ever could have wanted from him. He had wanted to end his selfish life with one small act of grace. Unseen in the darkness, voice unheard, Bohun’s lips shaped the words as he died: _His name was Jan._


End file.
